Formspring Reaches 16 Million Members; Check Out Its Latest Social Features Here

Over the past year, Formspring has become the latest social media craze for getting to know people. Someone posts a question for you (usually anonymously), and you reply with your honest answer. Can you think of a better way to ask probing questions without sounding like a stalker or a creep? We can't.

Though it's a few months shy of its one-year anniversary, the site has already reached more than 16 million registered members and is closing in on a billion questions answered. That's a lot of personal information being accessed through the interwebs, if you ask us.

To celebrate this, the small company has decided to upgrade a lot of its features, which until now have been pretty sparse. Here's a play-by-play of what's to come.

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The biggest feature launching within the next few weeks, "Connections," will expand the once-limited social graph. Before, you could follow other users but couldn't see who was actually following you -- or who was following anyone else. Talk about adding a voyeuristic approach to social media. There wasn't any real way to find interesting people to begin following, and this feature will change that.

It still won't use the traditional "follow" model, as seen on Twitter. Instead, you'll be able to automatically establish a connection with a user whenever you answer one of his/her questions or he/she answers one of yours. The system will also use weighting to show you your strongest potential connections. But don't worry: If you want to ask your question anonymously, you still can, and a connection won't be made. Phew.

An iPhone application will also be added. Formspring still won't have its own official application, but a third-party developer, Taptivate, has jumped in to build one. Called Spring, it's just been released today and works with the iPhone and the iPod Touch. We tested it and admit it adds a little more personality to the traditional Formspring platform. You can post standard questions for friends or someone you'd like to get to know better, or if you can't think of anything smart to say, roll the dice and Spring will start the conversation with a random question. You can still ask questions anonymously through the free app too.

Another new Formspring feature is Facebook's Like button. More questions will get shared on users' Facebook news feeds because of this feature, bringing even more attention to the popular Q&A site. With celebrities and musicians such as Adam Lambert and Tyga jumping on the Formspring bandwagon, do you think it will be the next trend in social media?

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